Ellen Tebbits

Ellen needs a best friend and is in luck when Augustine moves to town from California in woolen underwear! Now the girls share a secret and a bond. I've loved this juvenile fiction tale of elementary very-best-girlfriends ever since I was quite young and higher recommend it for children ages 4

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through 10. Ellen search for the beet, her trials with Otis, the naughty boy who teases her unmercifully - I dare say I can still recall almost every detail of this splendid story. Mmm......good.

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This is my favorite book from young childhood and I made sure my daughters also had a copy. It's the only childhood book I read over and over. I would even try to beat out anyone else in my school from borrowing it from the library. I htink I really identified with Ellen.

THis is a wonderful realistic fiction story. The reader is able to step inside the character of Ellen and fell the things that are going on with her. It takes place in a wonderful little neighborhood that could easily be identified with a reader of any age.

This book was written about 20 years earlier than most of the Ramona books, and it shows. Ellen's mother makes all her clothes for her and worries about her clean floor. (I'm not even sure I *have* a clean floor - or, some days, a floor at all!) The girls wear only dresses to school (and most

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everyplace else). Otis has a full cowboy outfit (with spurs) and we're told that MOST of the children in the school have a cowboy hat, or even a neckerchief. (When's the last time you saw that sort of cowboy mania? Oh right - back in the 50s, when this was published.) And let's not forget the infamous woolen undies. If it was old-fashioned back in the 50s, and this was the first I'd ever heard of it in the 90s, just think how foreign it must seem to today's third-graders! (And let's put a little note for the names. When is the last time you saw a class full of Ellens and Austines, Otises and Lindas? Ramona is a name that passes the test of time. Otis... not so much.)

But you know what? It doesn't matter. The kids still seem as real as when they were written. They bake brownies, they worry about their teacher not liking them, and they get into a whopper of a fight when Ellen slaps her friend. Everything that happens has a ring of truth to it, even if the details aren't quite like they would be today.

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This book is about a little girl who tries to hide her woolen underwear from the other girls at dance school. She makes friends with another girl and they share adventures through out the book and their friendship.

Beverly Cleary is another one of my favorite authors. I loved her books as a child. This book reminds me a lot of my childhood, my mom used to make me wear stuff that I didn't want to wear too. This is a good book about true friendship, you always go through obstacles but true friendship will

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overcome anything. In this book Ellen actually feels more like a real character than anything, the stuff she went through was a lot like my childhood.

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One of the first chapter books I read myself as a child, I thought is was hilarious. I remember running in to tell my mom how funny it was when Ellen's winter underwear started falling down in ballet class, to Ellen's horror. As with all her books Beverly Cleary nails the childhood experience, the

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confusion and misunderstanding, as well as the warmth of friendship and understanding. A perennial favorite.

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I read all the Beverly Cleary books over and over again as a kid, so I wanted to revisit this old favorite on audiobook. While I'm not sure it really holds up compared to the realistic fiction being published today, it's still a relateable story of best friends. The audio recording is nicely

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voiced, but the volume fluctuates, making it annoying to listen to in the car sometimes. I didn't particularly care for the voices used because a lot of the kids seemed to have a thick New England accent when the story is set in Oregon, but kids might just find the voices funny.

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Ellen is probably not as alluring as rambunctious silly Ramona to most people, but she was my first Cleary book and I never forgot her. Upon rereading I found that Cleary can still make me remember the joy of skipping through huge empty elementary school halls while others were in class. (I was

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probably on my way to the principal's office, but the hallway time was still fun.)

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Read this one to my daughter but I fondly remember it from my childhood (I remember preferring Otis Spofford). Cleary does the usual fantastic job of creating great characters you can relate to and then putting them in hilarious situations.

Highly recommended.

Cute book illustrating that it is possible to live through doing something you don't want to do in clothes that make you uncomfortable. And you can do it while someone is trying really hard to annoy you.

When I think about my own friendships that went awry in my long-ago youth (age 8 or 9), I find it very hard to figure out what the misunderstandings were about. Beverly Cleary has a gift for showing us the awkward pitfalls of friendship and the joy of discovering your best friend really is your

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best friend. Genius!

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Ellen Tebbits by Beverly Cleary is an amusing contemporary realistic fiction book about Ellen Tebbits and her classmates. Otis Spotford, who is Ellen's dance teacher's son and in Ellen's class at school, can usually be counted on cause some kind of disturbance. In his mother's dance class, he

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comically imitates Ellen's dance steps. In school, he takes out his Mexican jumping beans so other students want to watch them instead of paying attention to the lesson. He also creates unnecessary trouble between Ellen and her best friend Augustine. This book would be great for readers in elementary school in grades 2 and up as a chapter book to learn about everyday life of elementary school students with humorous situations.

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Ellen Tebbits doesn't have a close friend in her neighborhood. No one to play with. But then she meets Austine, who has moved to town from California. At first, Ellen doesn't care for Austine, but soon they become best friends. The two girls behave like real 4th graders... occasionally being mean,

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even to their best friend. They have spats. They make up. And both have to deal with Otis Spofford, whose goal in life seems to be to irritate girls his age.
Originally published in 1951, I thought this book aged remarkably well. Apart from the girls all wearing dresses to school, and the presence of a Maypole dance, the story fits just fine with the world today. A good light read for elementary school kids.

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